sgtprobe wrote:Maya sure looked tempting ... it really felt fresh and new and all that jazz.

yeah but that's about it, maya wasn't great at first either. poweranimator was beating the crap out of it modeling wise for many versions to come and maya's default renderer sucks (present tense because it never got better). the gui was fat and slow and the mentioned renderer only had smp support for some parts. selection of overlapping lines or points was pure luck compared to the oh so handy popup late poweranimator versions had for such cases ... and so on.you see i'm not interested in bashing xsi just for the heck of it, i could just shake my head everytime i see new stuff coming out that's miles behind what's there already and xsi was just one of those.

But I guess they (Avid) saw Wintel being the next "big thing", which, sadly, it was, not that it helped XSI in the end though.

in fairness that wasn't all up to avid. when xsi was started (called sumatra during the initial development phase) it was still under microsoft's roof and they did of course choose windows as their primary target. i'm actually not sure there would have been versions besides windows at all if microsoft wouldn't have sold softimage.

Today I'm working on your typical (well, maybe not, loaded with graphics hardware for GPU rendering and such) Off the shelf hardware running on Winblows (as you said). I start her up in the morning, working/rendering/modelling without any issues as a user without actually worrying what it says on the box. It's a tool, and it get's the job done and fast (although it could always be a gazillion times faster, but that goes for everything).

hehe yes sure and that's perfectly fine of course. today there's no other choice even if you wanted something different